Marcel de Leeuwe and I hosted a session at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012 about Do It Yourself Learning. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously preparing for the session and created a special website for the conference: doityourselflearning.org.
Why DIY?
There are a few things happening in the corporate learning world:
- The business is changing faster than the Learning function can keep up with.
- Effectiveness of learning is low with constant questions of the Return on Investment.
- Knowledge work (defined by Drucker as that work that can only the knowledge worker themselves can understand) is so complex that no curriculum can be made that can fit the very personal needs of each professional.
- There is a high mobility for employees, making it hard to defend investing in them.
At the same time the world is changing:
- Much of the world is globally connected.
- Effective tools for collaboration are ubiquitous and cheap.
This means that learners will start organizing their own learning. They will become their own designers and the role of the learning function will have to change.
Principles
We thought of five imperatives for the learning function to enable DIY learning and empower their staff:
- Devolve responsibility
- Be open
- Design experiences
- Provide scaffolding
- Stimulate reflection
Examples
To give people some idea of what DIY could look like we listed a set of examples: Self Organizing Learning Environments (SOLEs), MOOCs, Open Space Technology, a Juggling Convention, Yammer, World Without Oil, Uncollege, a virtual reading group and Livemocha.
We are always looking for new examples.
A DIY Manifesto
Through a very energetic process (first collaborative and then argumentative) the group of participants came up with a tentative set of statements for a Do It Yourself Learning Manifesto:
[vimeo 52056127]
A big you thank you to everybody who participated!